Polymarket goes to court in Netherlands over Dutch gambling ban
The company wants its event contracts supervised by the financial regulator. Dutch users stay blocked while the case runs. The financial rulebook carries a retail ban of its own.
Polymarket has started a case at the district court in The Hague against the order that removed it from the Netherlands. The company confirmed the challenge to Het Financieele Dagblad on Sunday 4 October, and BNR reported the venue. No filing date or hearing date has been published.
For Dutch users, nothing changes yet. The objection decision issued by the Kansspelautoriteit (KSA) on 23 June states that an appeal does not suspend it, so polymarket.com stays closed to Dutch IP addresses until a judge rules otherwise.
On 20 January the KSA ordered Adventure One QSS Inc., the New York company named in the site's terms of use, to stop serving the Netherlands. Four weeks to comply. After that, €420,000 for each week or part of a week, capped at €840,000.
Polymarket says its IP block went live on 18 February. The deadline was the 17th. One day cost €420,000, which the KSA's collection decision of 19 May records as unpaid.
The regulator's evidence was small in scale: a supervisor's account opened from a Dutch IP address, a €10 card deposit, and a $1 position on Rob Jetten in the market "Next Prime Minister of the Netherlands".
The legal question
Adventure One argued that it sets no rules, fixes no prizes and picks no winners, that settlement comes from an external oracle, and that a comparable US platform is licensed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a designated contract market. Its Dutch supervisor, it said, should be the Autoriteit Financiële Markten (AFM).
KSA chairman Michel Groothuizen signed the rejection. Dutch remote gambling rules permit bets only on sport and on horse and harness racing, the decision says, which leaves a contract on an election outside any licence the regulator can grant.
It also quotes Polymarket's own help text: "A prediction market is a platform where people can bet on the outcome of future events."
A ruling that event contracts are financial instruments would move Polymarket under a second rulebook, and that one restricts retail sales too. Since 19 April 2019 the AFM has prohibited the marketing, distribution or sale of binary options to retail clients in or from the Netherlands. There is no end date.
ESMA addressed the point on 3 July. Event contracts that are financial instruments, its statement said, "classify as derivatives and, given the binary outcome, fall within the scope of the existing national product intervention measures on binary options". The authority's Risk Monitor of 11 September added that selling them in the EU generally requires an authorisation "which the largest prediction market platforms currently do not hold".
What to watch
A hearing date comes first. Then the money: whether the €420,000 has been paid since May is not on the public record, and the KSA said in February that a turnover-related fine could still follow.
NOS reports that Polymarket is also banned in France and Germany. Whether it has gone to court in either country is not known.